1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of document editing and more particularly to processing static elements referenced within a document and stored externally to the document.
2. Description of the Related Art
Document editing relates to the creation, modification and persistence of a document. Documents can range from pure binary, hex and text files to complex compositions of multimedia elements and live links to other resources, for example Web pages. Document editing ordinarily involves loading a portion if not the entirety of a document in memory, rendering the document within a view in a host computing device, and permitting the addition of, deletion from and modification to data in the document through the view in the host computing device.
Document editors, particularly text editors, have particular application to the field of code development. In code development, code developers utilize the text editor to edit source code files. The source code files ultimately can be compiled into object code which in turn can be included as part of an application. In the field of code development, resources can be utilized in the source code for presentation or use in the resulting application. Examples include static user interface elements such as labels, help text or menu text. Most often, static elements are hard coded within the source code itself. Consequently, modifying the static elements of a computer program in many cases can require the modification of the source code for the computer program itself.
To address the problem of changing static elements in a computer program, modern code development protocol calls for the use of external files, often referred to as resource or property files, to store the static elements of a computer program such as error messages. References to static elements can be incorporated in source code in lieu of the static element as a placeholder for the static elements. As described in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. U.S. 2002/0162093 A1 by Zhou et al. for INTERNATIONALIZATION COMPILER AND PROCESS FOR LOCALIZING SERVER APPLICATIONS, this technique has become prevalent where a computer program is to be globalized or nationalized to accommodate multiple different languages for different jurisdictions without requiring wholesale changes to the source code for an application. Rather, a mere change to the content of the external file can suffice. Moreover, providing different external files for different languages can provide for a multi-lingual application without requiring changes to the source code.
While the use of an external file for static elements of a computer program has proven to be an effective means for providing flexibility and extensibility for the computer program, coordinating code development without automated access to the external file can be distracting and awkward for the code developer. In this regard, though some code development platforms, including the ECLIPSE™ platform (ECLIPSE is a trademark of the Eclipse Foundation, Inc.) provide for logic enabled to remove static elements from source code and to place static elements in an external file, no comparable logic is provided to remove static elements from an external file and return those static elements to the proper position in the source code.